David Brooks

I had hoped this election would be a moment of national renewal. I had hoped that the Democrats could decisively defeat MAGA populism and send us down a new national path. That’s clearly not going to happen. No matter who wins this election, it will be close, and this is still going to be an evenly…

If I were asked to list the major intellectual breakthroughs of the last half-century, I would certainly include the revolution in our understanding of emotion. For thousands of years, it was common in Western thought to imagine that there was an eternal war between reason and our emotions. In…

We used to have long debates about American exceptionalism, about whether this country was an outlier among nations, and I always thought the bulk of the evidence suggested that it was. But these days our political attitudes are pretty ordinary. America, far from standing out as the champion of…

Over the past few decades, in a surge of bipartisan national self-confidence, the federal government has borrowed a lot of money, sometimes in response to national emergencies and sometimes to do the things people thought were worth doing. We gave ourselves permission to incur all this debt because…

America is economically thriving but politically dysfunctional. We have the material, technological and military resources to remain the world’s leading superpower, but the current Congress is unable to make decisions about basic issues, like how to fix the immigration system or what role we should…

If I were asked to trace the decline of the American psyche, I suppose I would go to a set of cultural changes that started directly after World War II and built over the next few decades, when writers as diverse as Philip Rieff, Christopher Lasch and Tom Wolfe noticed the emergence of what came to…